When comparing UltraEdit vs Hex Fiend, the Slant community recommends Hex Fiend for most people. In the question“What are the best hex editors for Mac?”Hex Fiend is ranked 3rd while UltraEdit is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Hex Fiend is:

Open a huge file, scroll around, copy and paste, all instantly. Find what you’re looking for with fast searching.

Pros

Pro

Handles large files (>1GB) extremely well

UltraEdit has small memory usage and allows for fast parsing/searching when handling large files.

Pro

Works perfectly with remote files

Supports several protocols for accessing remote files and working on them with the same ease as local files. Files can be integrated in the projects as normal files.

Pro

Fast, stable, easy to use

Pro

Extremely customizable GUI editor

UltraEdit offer the best of both worlds. it has a full on GUI along with all the shortcut commands you need. There's no need for the user to suffer 80 char limitations of a terminal editor.

Pro

Highly flexible

UltraEdit allows you to handle groups of files as a project

Pro

Probably the most versatile general editor in existence.

If you need a general editor, UltraEdit is the way to go. If you were writing C/C++ all day, then this would be your editor. If you need to slog through large files then this is your go to editor. If you need to go through XML files, then this is your editor. If you need to sort data, then this your my editor.

Pro

Fast

Open a huge file, scroll around, copy and paste, all instantly. Find what you’re looking for with fast searching.

Pro

Small memory footprint

Hex Fiend does not keep your files in memory. You won’t dread launching or working with Hex Fiend even on low-RAM machines.

Pro

Free and open source

Hex Fiend is licensed under a permissive BSD-style license.

Pro

Works with huge files

Hex Fiend can handle as big a file as you’re able to create. It’s been tested on files as large as 118 GB.

Pro

Binary compare / diff

Hex Fiend can show the differences between files, taking into account insertions or deletions.

Pro

Data Inspector

Interpret data as integer or floating point, signed or unsigned, big or little endian...

Pro

Insert, delete, rearrange

Hex Fiend does not limit you to in-place changes like some hex editors.

Pro

Fast & efficient saving

Hex Fiend knows not to waste time overwriting the parts of your files that haven’t changed, and never needs temporary disk space.

Pro

Embeddable

Cons

Con

Proprietary

It's not free and a license costs $79.99.

Con

The themes introduced in version 20 regressed certain aspects of syntax coloring

The themes simplified the syntax highlighting which lost the capacity to have as many colors as one wanted to define. Now it is limited to around 20 different colors. In general it's not a problem but in certain cases it broke coloring.

Con

Files can't be saved with a .dat extension

Trying to save files with .dat extension gives the following error:

You cannot save this document with extension “.dat” at the end of the name. The required extension is “.(null)”.